As a lasting legacy to TB Joshua, Nigeria's pentecostal clergymen should combine their financial interests and create a conglomerate called Man of God PLC and use it to power the country out of poverty

Ayo Akinfe

[1] What Nigeria is going through today with the evangelical churches is not unique. In Europe, when Christianity became the official religion, that is how the Catholic Church dominated society

[2] The Catholic Church owned huge tracks of land across Europe and the bishop was effectively the landlord commanding the power of life and death over millions of peasants and serfs

[3] If you look of the early exploration voyages conducted by the Spanish and Portuguese, the capital for it came from the Catholic Church

[4] When the trans-Atlantic Slave Trade took off, it was the Catholic Church that was in the vanguard. It owned slave ships, plantations in the New World and was one of the largest beneficiaries of the booming industry

[5] Ignorance, fear, loathe, intellectual laziness and superstition will always drive the masses to look up to a power institution like the church to grant them "redemption." We are just going through this process now

[6] People pay 10% of their wages to the church in the form of tithes and about 2% to 10% to the state in the form of tax. Consequently, the church will always have more access to capital than the state. This is apart from the fact that people have to be pursued to pay taxes, while they cheerfully give to the church in the hope of receiving "God's blessings."

[7] However, the difference between the European Catholic Church and the Nigerian pentecostal churches is that the Europeans invested their tithes massively. They built castles, ships, palaces, cathedrals, companies and multiplied their wealth a hundred fold

[8] My big beef with Nigerian pentecostal churches is that they are not investing their wealth properly. Between Oyedepo, Adeboye, Joshua, Okotie, Ashimilowo, Oritsejafor, etc, they can probably generate more than Nigeria's $20bn annual budget. Just imagine how that could radically transform Nigeria

[9] All this talk about "government" is just plain intellectually lazy and dumb. Britain's Industrial revolution did not start in Downing Street, the German Reichstag had nothing to do with the Gutenburg printing press and the US Congress or the White House were nowhere to be found when Henry Ford revolutionised production with his assembly plant. It is ordinary men and women, pioneers, entrepreneurs and those with access to capital like our pastorprueners that move society forward. In the UK, their railway was up and running, wholly funded by private capital before the government even knew about its existence

[10] Nigeria's pentecostal pastorprueners should pool their resources together into a company called Man of God Plc and take on the task of industrialising Nigeria. Can you imagine how such a company could dominate farming and agribusiness processing, own ships, refine crude oil, mine solid minerals, sell Nigerian ankara internationally and exploit of cocoa production to make us the world's number one chocolate economy? They are wasting this capital and this is a chance in a lifetime, which we may not get again